jQuery: dNotify - A simple user notification plugin for jQuery

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Today we are going to talk about dNotify, a simple user notification plugin for jQuery.
The way this simple plugin works is very interesting. Because I usually hate when popup message start to - well - pop up all over the web site, I've found dNotify quite unobtrusive. Moreover, we should consider the use of dNotify in web applications, where we do need to interact with the user more than in other situations.
What makes the plugin almost unique is the fact we can control everything about the notification.
Let's see how we can use it.

JavaScript: create a popup window and update parent on close

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I use popup windows rarely because most of today browsers try to block them. However sometimes they are handy and - let me say - beautiful. I've used them in a web application where detail information of a record are displayed and modified through a popup. In this situation, what I needed was to open the window in the centre of the screen and to update the parent window when the popup is closed.

Add a Progress Indicator to your asp page

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Sometimes when developing a web application, you need to query a large amount of data, manipulate it and present it in a beautiful and readable way. That kind of operations – given that you created a resource optimized sql query – might take time and the user, waiting for data to appear on the screen, might get nervous not knowing what is really happening to the submitted request. So what? There are risks involved in that waiting: the user might hit other buttons sending multiple requests to the server. Again the user might submit data update more than one time. Or, simply, the user might think that your application is lousy and really slow (while you know that the user just submitted a very complicated query and you can’t do much about it in terms of speeding up the process!).